This week, Monday 1st April 2013

Posted on By Captain Pigheart

Freedom, Of A Limited Sort

Happy FaceYes, I have now bagged myself a sweet week of peace and leave. The odd result is that I shall struggle to meet all of my post deadlines this week. It is because I shall sleep until about one o’clock every afternoon and then run out of time. That’s all for the good though, as I’ve just barely gotten over last week’s Skullfucker Plague. The healing process involved one of those terribly helpful visits to the doctor. It was actually one of the highlights of another terrible week of work, even if it was only four days long (thank goodness for nailing people to crosses). Seriously, if anyone has something they want done for money, bump it my way please.

I like to take a list with me to the doc, because otherwise I just feel like I’m complaining and want to stop and escape before I’ve even gotten to the good stuff. Everything that’s wrong with me is a virus (probably) or some lungrot caused and exacerbated by our continued cold and damp weather (so I shall die of this in England), or the result of stress. Excellent. Therefore the planned week of leave is the ideal remedy and is also my Lady Half’s birthday week! Huzzah.

This week’s scribbles

Tuesday Appeasement and Loss

A short story set in a fantasy world where revenge is all that’s left to one man.

Wednesday Lego Creations: Mini Mech

A happy rootling about in my Lego box and an enthusiasm for matching colours resulted in quite a nice build.

Thursday The Desert Crystals – Part Two

The expedition gathers pace, hardware and danger…

Friday Book Review: The Departed by Neil Asher

I’m behind the times as always, but I finally got round to reading the first in a new series by one of my favourite authors.

Updates on my thrilling life

Writing

Tiresome repetition! I made the mistake of going to work last week and it almost crushed my desire to function. As a consequence I am in catch up mode. That was proving really difficult earlier (compounded by the shrieking of rat children outside – yay, Easter…) until I found myself in a scribble-frenzy. I don’t know what brings them on but it certainly seemed to be influenced by trying to read my own appalling hand writing in my night writing book. It sits by the bed waiting for me to blindly scrawl nonsense in it and then I am unable to decipher it.

I thought I’d found an unused scrap of Pigheart in it, but it took half an hour to translate maybe a hundred words and then realised it was a very early draft of The Assassination Adventure. Very annoying, but it got me onto writing Tuesday’s story ‘Appeasement and Loss’. Not cheery, but then that doesn’t seem to be the way my stories are going at the moment. That makes me a bit sad.

Last week’s scribbles

Shankanalia 8The Desert CrystalsTuesday Skankrabatic – The Sinuous Twist of Angry Poetry De-stressing with short enraged poems..

Wednesday Pulp Pirate 17 Piracy returns to the Flash Pulp podcast.

Thursday The Desert Crystals – Part One A fresh expedition into the extraordinary Northern Continent begins.

Friday Film Review: Welcome To The Punch (2013) Another dreadful waste of celluloid.

Lego

Boba Fett’s house has gotten out of control… I’m now nowhere near finished once I realised that I wanted an extra floor and to be able to see inside it. I didn’t want the grief of making a model that splits in half, so it’s just getting taller. Really it needs that though because there isn’t even a bed for the poor Mandalorian fellow, let alone a kitchen yet. Bounty hunters cannot live by guns alone. So work must continue anon!

Improv Comedy

We had a show on Friday at The Glee Club which was good fun. We had a somewhat unfocussed first half but definitely got it back together fully for a strong second half. That said, I really enjoyed the scenes I did in the first half, including a Shakespearean Scene with Marilyn (always a joy) which had something to do with being a lollipop man distracted by the touch of a bosom. It did in fact utterly derail my attempts to speak, resulting in new words for me and my character. I also took this month’s monologue (me repaying myself back for a month of bastardy) and told a lovely dark, spotlit (thank you James) tale about my spiritualist father and our caravan home in Penzance. I enjoyed that a lot.

I also still love our intro theme by The Nibbler:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/22520253″ iframe=”true” /]

We also met and had a chat with some of the guys from The Noise Next Door who were playing downstairs at the same time as us. They were nice enough to pop up and catch part of our set. They’re the UK’s only (I think) professional improv outfit – and they work a lot. They do an excellent super-polished show and are very funny fellows indeed. I see them as brand ambassadors for the whole of the UK improv comedy scene and hope to see them again soon. It was very cool to have an improv venue for a whole night in Nottingham.

Media Intake

Books

I return to the massive tomes of Peter F Hamilton! Yup, I’m on the middle book of the Void trilogy – The Evolutionary Void. I have to thrust some of this space opera fun onto a friend who only seems to read old-school sci fi and rejects the new wave of amazing British sci fi. Obviously he’s wrong, but he really needs to feel the error of his ways.

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